The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  “It’s good to see you, too, Randy,” McClain answers.

  Everyone claps after the introductions. To choose teams, we pair off, roughly by height, picking up the younger brothers and their friends to fill out the sides. McClain says, “My advice to you all: Play hard and keep it clean!”

  The game starts. Chris takes the first shot. He misses, and Eric’s younger brother, Joe, grabs the rebound and kicks it out to Damian at the top of the key, who nails a jumper.

  Chris hits the next shot from far out on the left side of the basket.

  When Dino gets the ball, just beyond the three-point line, he rises and fires a jumper that pops down through the net. He has exactly the same form he had as a kid, and, as usual, no hesitation in shooting it.

  There might be an undiscovered gene that determines your basketball skills, because everyone plays in almost the exact same style he did twenty years earlier.

  Even though he’s gained some weight, Eric still has a rattlesnake-quick lateral step he uses to throw off defenders, drive by them, and then put up a high-arcing shot that seems to slide straight down through the basket.

  Chris’s shirt is soon soaked with sweat as he bangs away against Sean for position under the basket. When a teammate shoots an air ball that bounces on the floor, heading out of bounds, Chris leaps after it in an attempt to keep possession for his team.

  Sean would get the prize for most improved. Still thin and with the same long limbs and wingspan, he has grown into his body and crosses the court without the awkward, robotlike movements he had as a kid.

  When Damian dribbles, he pounds the ball into the court like he’s trying to punish it. As soon as we start the game, he also gets deadly serious. He wants to win.

  Maitland sits it out, watching from the top row of the three-level bleachers, his elbows on his knees. Later, he grabs a ball and shoots on one end of the court when everyone is on the opposite side.

  Coach McClain sits on the first row of the bleachers, leaning forward, studying every play, looking totally content. As he always used to do, he occasionally erupts with admonishments: “Cut the baseline off! Step up and play defense! Come on, Damian, you gotta get that!”

  My only reliable play remains the outside shot. At one point, Damian gets free at the top of the key and drives toward the hoop. I am standing a few feet away from the basket and come off my man to pick up Damian, who is barreling straight down the lane. He begins to jump, the ball in his right hand as his arm rises toward the hoop. I leap and try to block his shot. We collide in midair, both of us stopping cold, my head jolted back as I absorb the force of Damian’s momentum. Willie McClain emits a loud groan from the sideline. Next time, I think, I’ll let Damian have the two points.

  We take breaks between the games. Players gulp from their water bottles and rest on the bleachers. Chris, smiling, comes up, knocks me on the shoulder, and tells me he loves being back with the guys. Damian makes motions like he’s practicing his jump shot and calls out, “Hey Coach McClain, you were right, too! I missed him underneath.”

  Dino asks Eric where his office is. “Your e-mail’s on that list?” he asks. “You’re working downtown? I’ll hit you. We can get lunch.”

  During one game, I sub out and sit on the bleachers. It’s impossible not to notice that all the white players from the team are here while several of the black guys aren’t—Will McClain Jr. and JT, who’d both said they were coming, haven’t shown up. I miss Tyrell’s smile and the suspense of knowing he might at any point pull off an outrageous, behind-the-back move. I miss Myran’s running commentary and jokes.

  After several games, when everyone’s had enough, we head over to Zion Preparatory Academy, where we have pizza and soda in the cafeteria under the framed pictures of the Tuskegee Airmen that hang on the walls. There is a lot of catching up and reminiscing about things such as listening to Run DMC and ranking on each other during the van rides.

  (Rob Finley)

  (Rob Finley)

  Eventually we settle into chairs and form a circle. Randy Finley kicks things off by talking about his motivations for forming the team. “What I wanted out of this was a group of kids to learn from basketball just how much bigger the world is,” he says.

  Willie McClain speaks next. “My motivation was selfish,” he says. “The purpose for me was to give an opportunity to the players that I had been bringing up in athletics, the opportunity to go to the Lakesides, the Seattle Preps, and things like that.”

  As we talk, Sean leans forward, following each comment. Maitland and Eric both say little. Damian maintains a focused look throughout.

  “The cool thing about the team was that it was different from the way I was brought up and where I came from,” Chris says. “Nobody remembers any of the games, we just remember what it felt like to be with everybody.”

  When the conversation comes around to him, Eric says, “It was a great time and I’m really glad Doug did this and I got a chance to see all you guys again. I’m touched and I’m just happy to see everybody again and I don’t know …” Eric chokes up, holding back tears. “I don’t want to get too deep,” he says and stops.

  At one point I mention the old Lakeside chant, “It’s all right, it’s OK, you’ll all work for us someday.”

  “I think they did at Seattle Prep, too,” Sean says.

  “This was against Rainier Beach,” says Damian, who was the first to remind me of the chant.

  No one else wants to pick it up, so Coach McClain jumps in: “You’re talking about two worlds, spectators and players, people who come to the game and watch, and people who will unite and fight at the drop of a hat for every player on that floor.”

  “On the floor, the power’s with the coach and we have a united goal, and that’s to win the game,” Sean says. “That’s what Coach was saying, the basketball court is sort of, I don’t know, it’s not the sanctuary …”

  “That’s the word,” Willie McClain answers.

  Damian says that after Randy Finley got him into Seattle Prep, he saw that even some kids who were rich were still adrift because their parents fought or were gone all the time. He was poor, he tells the group, but he always knew his mom loved him. Everybody has problems, he says, not just people who happen to be poor and black. “It’s not just us having the issues, it’s everybody having the issues. It’s just in a different area. So that’s why the whole experience works for everybody,” he says of playing basketball together.

  In the middle of the conversation, JT walks up to the glass doors of the school. He wears black pants, tan Timberland boots, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt with G-UNIT written on the front in silver cursive. Randy Finley gets up and rushes over to greet him. As JT enters the circle, Willie McClain says, “Hey, JT!” and stands to hug him. After grasping McClain, JT makes his way around the circle, hugging each player one by one before he sits down next to me.

  When it comes around to him, JT is the first to bring up Tyrell. “I’d just like to talk about T-Baby,” he says. “You guys probably already did that …”

  “Just a bit,” Willie McClain says.

  “Man, I can’t understand why he didn’t take that chance,” JT says about Tyrell’s opportunity to go to private school through our team. “I don’t know what he said to you. He should have just tried. He could have gone back to Garfield.”

  “I think for Tyrell there was a lot of outside pressure for him to be in the local high school, Garfield. I think a lot of coaches, parents, people that had tradition with Garfield, did not see,” Willie McClain says. “There was no doubt that T was going to go to Garfield and private school wasn’t an option.”

  Coach McClain has told me this before. His hope for Tyrell was that he would take the chances offered him and get away from the streets. He didn’t, and he died.

  One, of course, doesn’t necessarily follow the other. But in speaking about it with Coach McClain, I realized that he saw the team in life-and-death terms—at the time we came together in 1
986, some of his players were facing futures that would considerably darken over the next few years. He had seen the chance to get his guys into private schools as an alternative track that might well keep them alive. For Coach McClain, Tyrell’s refusal to embrace opportunity revealed an unwillingness to change the direction of his life.

  Other guys had their own thoughts about Tyrell’s life and death when I first spoke with them. Sean, the prosecutor, told me that what happened to Tyrell was tragic, but that when he worked in the juvenile court system, he saw a lot of cases that also were tragic. He says that, if anything, having known Tyrell made him more dedicated to his work—if people know there are consequences to their actions, he says, they’ll be less likely to commit crimes. If they don’t commit crimes, they won’t place themselves in danger, as Tyrell did.

  Damian, who also had sold drugs, distanced himself. He thought that Tyrell had gotten in way too deep and been set up by a group such as the Black Gangster Disciples. “The last time I saw him, I was at a skating party or something, and he was gone, to where he almost didn’t notice me,” Damian says. “He was gone. So he probably knew that something was happening. It was shortly after that that he ended up dead.”

  JT saw his own alternative fate in Tyrell. “It could have been any one of us,” he says.

  Tyrell’s death, though, fails to provide much meaning at all. He was a kid who grew up in the neighborhood and went along with what people around him were doing. He hadn’t shown any particular ambition besides trying to get enough money together to have a good time. He died at age nineteen—not even really out of childhood—because, it seems, a couple of men wanted to get a piece of some gambling winnings. “Tyrell was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” his brother, Donnico, says. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I got a real good feeling. It wasn’t for him. They didn’t know him, he wasn’t doing the drug deal—he was just with his friend.”

  Donnico says his family has never gotten over Tyrell’s death. “My mom and dad, and my little sister, every now and then they’ll just start staring at me, you know, and they’ll be, ‘Man, your brother’s supposed to be here right now.’ Just certain things, right? And like, my little sister, we’ll all be somewhere and she’ll just start crying.”

  Even now, Donnico tells me, Tyrell still sometimes visits him in his dreams. Every time it’s as real as if his brother were sitting and talking right there next to him. The visions always end the same way: As Tyrell gets ready to leave, Donnico becomes frantic, begging him to stay a little longer. Tyrell looks at his brother. “I gotta go now,” he says, fading away as Donnico tries to hold on to him.

  I’d been trying to hold on to Tyrell, too, or at least a memory of a time long passed. On some deep level—I certainly was not entirely conscious of it—I’d thought that by finding out what happened to Tyrell and my teammates, and getting everyone back together, maybe I could regain some of that sense of being part of a team with other guys at your back, believing that you could conquer the world, that the security of the court was going to extend off of it. It was as futile as calling Tyrell’s parents to invite them to the reunion and thinking they might come.

  Tyrell’s story is done. He will always be that kid on the front page of the paper, taking a knee and smiling at the photographer. The rest of us, cropped out of that picture, have gone on.

  In the more than twenty years since we played together, we’ve made our ways through a changing era whose contours were apparent in the front-page coverage of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the day Tyrell made his headline. The end of the Cold War and advancing technology has ushered in an ever-faster, more competitive world. Seattle has adjusted about as well as anyplace else in the country, retooling the local economy toward high-tech, white-collar work. Those of us in private school back in 1986 were getting a much better preparation for this new reality.

  Within this larger context, everyone from our team is an individual with his own aspirations, hopes, and struggles. The reason I was able to work for so long on this book was that I immensely enjoyed speaking with each of my teammates. Each guy, as an adult, has his own special qualities.

  Eric struck me with his wry sense of humor and a deadeye analysis that I hadn’t known as a kid. He may be quiet, but nothing escapes his observation.

  Chris and I talked intensely about the way boys (and men) use sports to shape their identities and hide insecurities, something that has troubled both of us since the evening we met at an eighth-grade school dance.

  Willie Jr. made me laugh with his lighthearted sense of humor and quick turns of phrase. He delights in the presence of his kids.

  Sean fascinated me with tales of grisly crime cases and the way the prosecutors approached trying them. As always, Sean sprinkled his stories with incisive stabs of humor.

  Dino is committed to his family, loves his work, and is truly gifted at it. He has a deep sense of his own identity that allows him to thrive in a cutthroat industry.

  Maitland, when you sit and speak with him, radiates a thoughtfulness, intelligence, and essential kindness that is hard to get on the page.

  Every time I visited Randy Finley at his winery, he was the same whirlwind as ever, telling jokes, pouring me glasses, and regaling me with digressive stories that almost always, eventually, wound back to make a point.

  I’d hardly known Coach McClain as a kid. After spending time with him as an adult, I came to see him as an amazing man—his life spans from pre–civil rights, segregated Mississippi to tech-era Seattle. Along the way, he’s found a calling—in tandem with Diane, his wonderful wife—by being a solid source of support for other people who need help. In his own, humble way, he’s lived a life to emulate.

  Of course, when you spend so much time with people, there are those you become especially close with. For me, that happened to be Damian, Myran, and JT.

  Damian and I hit it off from the first evening we sat down at his kitchen table. We both share an abiding interest in the vagaries of race and class. Countless times, we talked for hours on end, each of us making our points, finding agreement, and challenging each other where we disagreed. We don’t find accord on everything. I know that in my case, at least, our jousting has made me rethink a lot of my own assumptions.

  I walked back into Myran’s life during a very rough time. As always, he made me laugh with his string of jokes, some fairly outrageous. Beyond that, though, there were times when the kid I once knew was right there in front of me, trying hard to make a connection. When I saw his situation, I realized that he didn’t exactly need someone to drop in, take notes for a book, and then disappear. He needed a friend who could try to provide some support and encouragement. I hope I will be able to do that.

  JT is simply one of the most openhearted, enthusiastic people I’ve ever known. Given the reality of street hustling, these are qualities he often has to cover up. But away from the streets, he is always a joy to be around. We met many times early in the morning to walk the two-and-a-half-mile loop around Seward Park in South Seattle. Along the way, JT would always jauntily greet our fellow walkers, black and white, exclaiming, “It’s a beautiful day!” On a deeper level, from our very first meeting, JT identified the team as a “family.” While I might have been embarrassed to use that exact formulation, I had the same feelings myself. We had both been boys looking to salve our insecurities, a place to feel safe. When sports ended for JT, he transitioned into the streets. With my background, I was fortunate to have many more options.

  I chose to get far away. I didn’t want to deal with things falling apart, especially the pain of my own family coming undone. I saw distance and separation as means to escape. But to wall yourself off from hurt is also to block out much of being human. In the end, the championship moments are brief. Everything in between comprises the brunt of life. People—whether collected in teams or in families—are imperfect. You invest in them and they disappoint. You get ground down, and you let yourself down. You try and you fail. If yo
u’re lucky, you get another chance to try again.

  Coach McClain was right. Basketball welded the two sides of our team. Playing on a team excused us to give ourselves wholeheartedly to a cause and a group of people in a way we otherwise couldn’t. Without the structure of a team, it’s almost impossible to keep it going. As men, we get pulled apart—even before the divisions of race and class are factored in. As Eric says, you get caught up in the hustle of life—you focus on your job, your family, paying the mortgage, and you lose track of the other things you could be doing.

  Jackie Robinson, later in his life, recognized that sports are an imperfect vehicle for achieving equality. In fact, celebrating people on the athletic fields can be a substitute for real equality. It’s one thing to give up a position in the starting lineup of a basketball team, and totally another to lose a slot at a prestigious private school. In Damian’s words, there was a reason why the Lakeside kids used to chant “It’s all right, it’s OK, you’ll all work for us someday”: It reflected a truth that insisted on being spoken.

  Our team was never going to do more than paper over this rift and perhaps give a few of the black players a shot at bettering their positions in life. There were really no demands on the white side except to simply show up. Lasting friendships can’t be built when the power differential flops onto one side. To really work, the group with the advantages—money, position, status, education—has to let down the armor of superiority, has to give up its edge.

  It always struck me, when I spoke with my teammates about our time playing together, that the dominant memories were of joking around during the van rides. No one had clear recollections of our games—it would have been very hard to write about them if Maitland’s brother, Rob, had not unearthed a couple of old videotapes. I think those rides, though so brief, showed us possibilities for something different, what we could be—just kids having fun and forgetting, temporarily, Lakeside, the Central Area, whatever individual ruts we were in at school and at home. I’ve come to see why Coach McClain said the team “worked,” even if the later outcomes for some players have been so sad and tragic. Those moments showed him something that he hadn’t seen in his life before, and hasn’t seen since. It was a vision of transformation, of our better selves.